Fact: 23 is a pretty unremarkable age when it comes to birthdays. So I haven't really celebrated it at all. I mean, I had a cake for morning tea and this really nice lunch with the parental unit at a pub in the city, but now I'm home and I'm about to resume working on the chapter one draft for the thesis.

A few days ago, Dad asked me if there was anything I wanted for my birthday. And I couldn't think of anything that I was really in need of. A few months ago I was covetting a laptop, but now that I'm into the swing of thesis writing, I'm not really seeing the need for it. In fact, I think the thesis is why I'm having such a non-event birthday. Celebrating seems kinda wrong when I've got this magnum opus lurking in the back of my mind.

If I wasn't writing a thesis now, I might have told Dad I wanted a Nintendo Wii (I also want a new bookcase, but there's more room for a Wii than there is for another bookcase in the house). Which I do, but I know that it'll distract me from the thesis, so that can wait until next year when I have free time to enjoy it without guilt (though by that point I'll probably end up buying it myself).

That said: I did get nice presents. Many books, some clothing items, chocolates and some Stephen Colbert goodness (thanks severa! *squish*), so I'm reasonably happy. But I'm also really looking forward to a birthday where I'm not under pressure to get thesis work done. So there it is!

On a somewhat related note, Amy and I went and saw 'The Other Boleyn Girl' at the movies yesterday. I'd read the bad reviews, but we'd promised that we would see it together ages before it came out, and we only got around to it yesterday. And it wasn't great. Not so much the cast, the acting was very good, but the script was just awful. And in opposition to the angry shouty Henry VIII in the Tudors that Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays, Eric Bana's Henry was way too subdued, not tempestuous enough. But yeah, I blame the script for that rather than Bana. And the film wasn't particularly accurate, but while you can overlook that when it's a really good production (like the first Elizabeth movie), you couldn't here because the liberties they took with particular figures and the timeline were excessive.

If I wasn't feeling so tired, I'd rant more on it, but I need to put my energy into the thesis work. And so on with it!